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Howto: BT4 boot without changing partitions, no USB boot, etc in grub

This is my first tutorial, and I am writing it hoping that I can help someone else who has old hardware. My laptop has a busted DVD drive, can't boot from a USB drive, and I don't want to edit the partitions, and install it onto the drive. (security reasons...covered shortly)

This is being performed on Ubuntu 8.10 (ducks), but should work with any other install of Linux. If the backtrack DVD's stay the same, you should be able to slightly modify the files, so you can boot the latest version. Let's get started!

First things first. Download the latest DVD copy of backtrack. From the date writing this, the latest is BT4 beta.

Open the .iso, and extract the 2 folders, boot and BT4, and put them somewhere you can find them.

Now comes the fun part. Copy the BT4 folder to the root of the drive. There was a problem with older hardware not liking this folder anywhere else other than /. To cover all basis...just put it there.

Code:

sudo mv BT4 /

Once that folder is moved, make a new directory in /boot, and chmod it. This will let you put new files into it later, so you can use up coming releases the same way. (Which is what I will be doing =)

You can play with the chmod, and see what works best for you for security purposes.

Now, it's time to edit your menu.lst, which is found in /boot/grub/menu.lst , if your using Ubuntu. We need to tell it how to boot BT, and where to find it. For me, the partition that is being used is /dev/sda5. Heres what mine looks like: